Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Birds

Over on Pat's Art Journal there are some fabulous pictures of Baltimore Orioles. DH and I like to watch the birds, although we are strictly amatuers. I keep a bird book handy, but it usually just ends up in a friendly debate over what we are actually looking at. We have some bright yellow and black birds a little like these, but I am pretty sure they are not the same bird.Probably the most interesting and exotic birds we see are the parrots. Yes, parrots. I remember the first time I saw them. It was a few years back, and I was walking with a friend for exercise around the track at the local high school. The whole flock was lined up on a telephone wire. Now my distance vision isn't all it could be, so I wasn't at all sure what I was seeing until I got really close. But there they were, all bright yellow, red and green and squaking up a storm. Trust me, you do NOT want parrots to move into your yard, they are noisy and disruptive. When I told my son, he said they were frequently in the area and the teacher sometimes had to close the window because of the noise. Not long after that, I saw a newspaper article about them. There has been a lot of speculation on where they came from and how they started. Did they fly up from Mexico, escape from a pet store, fly away from a zoo ? Whatever their origin, someone counted, and the flock is up to about 300 birds. Amazing!